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Sunday, May 17, 2015

The 1% May Face The Wrath of Sea Level Rise First

Regular readers know that I have been writing about sea level rise (SLR) a lot lately, which means reading a lot of research material.

In this post I want to point out, based upon that recent research, what I see written and spoken often.

It is a misunderstanding frequently printed and spoken by social and corporate media.

That misunderstanding is the notion that life-threatening SLR will first be tilted against the world's poorest people:

"As the coastal cities of Africa and Asia expand, many of their poorest residents are being pushed to the edges of livable land and into the most dangerous zones for climate change. Their informal settlements cling to riverbanks and cluster in low-lying areas with poor drainage, few public services, and no protection from storm surges, sea-level rise, and flooding.These communities – the poor in coastal cities and on low-lying islands – are among the world’s most vulnerable to climate change and the least able to marshal the resources to adapt, a new report finds."

A new report by the U.S. Army War College talks about the possibility of Pentagon resources and troops being used should the economic crisis lead to civil unrest, such as protests against businesses and government or runs on beleaguered banks.

“Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security,” said the War College report.

The study says economic collapse, terrorism and loss of legal order are among possible domestic shocks that might require military action within the U.S.

I am not sure that they contemplated unrest caused by SLR, but they do expect that unrest is coming, thus, they have been training and preparing for it:

This lesson is designed to describe the nature and causes of disaffection and social unrest; define the potential for social unrest in the United States; identify the types of confrontations; define crowd behavioral and psychological influences; identify patterns of disorder.…
2. Application of Force.

a. General.

(1) Civil disturbance operations by federal forces will not be authorized until

the President is advised by the highest officials of the state that the situation cannot be controlled with nonfederal resources available. The mission of the control force is to help restore law and order and to help maintain it until such time as state and local forces can control the situation without federal help. In performing this mission, the control force may have to actively participate, not only in subduing the disturbance, but also in helping to detain those responsible for it. Control force commanders are authorized and directed to provide such active participation, subject to restraints on the use of force.

(2) Prior to committing any federal forces in the quailing of civil disturbance whether in CONUS or OCONUS commanders should train and continually brief the control force on the rule of engagement (ROE). The commander is responsible for drafting, interpreting, disseminating, and training the control force on the ROE. The staff Judge Advocate (SJA) should be included in the ROE development to ensure that it will not improperly constrain actions, but still will remain consistent with domestic and international laws, polices, and orders of the chain of command.

For quite a while now, the gist of that writing has been about what happens once the "put them all in camps to protect and care for them policy" degrades into an operation of killer-cop types:

“Whereas it appeareth that however certain forms of government are better calculated than others to protect individuals in the free exercise of their natural rights, and are at the same time themselves better guarded against degeneracy, yet experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, ....whence it becomes expedient for promoting the publick happiness that those persons, whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens, and that they should be called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth or accidental condition of circumstance.”

(Thomas Jefferson, emphasis added). The current nationwide policy, of giving used-battle-gear and equipment to local police forces, shows that "there are many here among us" who are not human-rights, civil-rights, constitutional-rights, or democratic-rights oriented.

There have always been, and will continue be, those who chose to push the limit way past those concepts, and on into tyranny:

All of the international trading nations of this civilization will be impacted.

Don't forget to compute those damages as if they were choreographed at an ongoing Groundhog Day movie set, because the SLR is not going to stop just because we become uncomfortable (Will This Float Your Boat - 9).

The maximum stopping point is 263.5 feet of SLR.

I could go on, but I am sure you get the gist of it, so let's get back to the dynamics of SLR.

I have written, along with many others, about the dynamics of a warming Arctic that are now impacting the Greenland Ice Sheet, and the resulting danger to the U.S. North East coastal population areas and ports.

The next post in this series is here. HBO Vice: "Our Rising Oceans", with Dr. Eric Rignot:
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2:43 - "One meter [of SLR] would be a global catastrophic event, 3 meters would remap the world as we know it?"

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